How the Army tried to explore ancient Mars with a psychic

In 1984, the Army was studying all sorts of paranormal phenomena, from men trying to walk through walls and move objects with their mind to killing goats from 100 feet away. One of the lesser-known experiments was in "astral projection" with soldiers trying to move their consciousness to a different time and space. And the most exotic locale they tried to reach was a million years ago on Mars.

On May 22, 1984, the Army gave one of their psychic soldiers, like the ones depicted in The Men Who Stare at Goats, an envelope. They told this test subject to focus his mind on "the information in the envelope." Then they told him to focus on specific coordinates and report what he saw.

They didn't let him read the information in the envelope. So he didn't know he was being asked to focus on the planet Mars in the year 1 million B.C.

His reports get pretty weird, pretty fast though. At the first set of coordinates, the subject claims to see a pyramid and the "after effect of a major geologic problem." When told to go back to a time before the geologic event, he starts describing an entire ancient civilization.

(NASA)

I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they're very large. Ah...wearing some kind of strange clothes.

These thin and tall people lived in a series of structures built in the walls of massive canyons.

...it's like a rabbit warren, corners of rooms, they're really huge, I don't, feel like I'm standing in one it's just really huge. Perception is that the ceiling is very high, walls very wide.

The best part is how the guide responds to this. Remember, he's hearing a "psychic" describe what ancient Mars was like. And when he hears that the rooms are large and laid out like a rabbit warren, he responds, "Yes that would be correct."

Yeah, the dude asking psychics to describe an ancient Martian civilization was pretty sure what the rooms should look like.

The subject goes on to describe aqueducts, pyramid-shaped storm shelters, and more.

And in the storm shelters, the test subject actually spoke with these massive Martians. It turns out, their society was dying, and massive storms were destroying the planet. The Martians that the subject was speaking to were waiting for it all to collapse. But they had sent a group to populate somewhere new.

It's like I'm getting all kinds of overwhelming input of the....corruption of their environment. It's failing very rapidly, and this group went somewhere, like a long way to find another place to live.

No one says that this party of ancient Martians were the first humans. But we all get it, right?

According to a Slate article, retired Army Chief Warrant Officer Joseph McMoneagle claims to have been the test subject. He believes that the experiments were real and that he was really seeing the surface of an ancient planet. But he also says that such exotic requests were rare. He also said that he didn't like studying Mars or UFOs or anything similar because "there's no real way to validate the information."

The Army's remote-viewing program supposedly shut down in the 1990s because it "failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence gathering."